The Political Consequences of Youtube: Caleb on the Cover of the New York Times.

the appearance of the Faraday speaks
story on the front page in the New York Times today is an interesting milestone in the gradual awakening of the mainstream press of the world outside of YouTube the awakening to the extent to which politics on this platform politics on YouTube are real politics that really matter that have real consequences for people not just huge numbers of people but also the depth of the influence the meaning that this has in people's lives in contrast other types of forums and other types of formats for political discourse and speech that frankly the mainstream media treats as if they're much more important when they're not so to throw two contrasting examples quite a few inches of newspaper or headlines have been given to a protest in California involving a few dozen vegans where they went and protested at a duck Factory okay so that's an event that involves a few dozen people maybe 100 people during a couple of hours and we're really no words of any meaning or depth or change from either side you know people show slogans at a protest people demonstrate if very limited sense of the word there's also a lot of press coverage for a current event being hosted by turning-point USA it's something like Turning Point USA Young Women's Leadership Conference and that event there boasted absolutely boasting about having 1,400 people attended the audience now aside from the fact that both these numbers whether it's 100 people at a protest in real life at a demonstration or 1,400 people in a rented venue standing the audience all those numbers are tiny even by YouTube channel standards right you wouldn't be considered a successful YouTube channel if you have only 1400 viewers in a video and yet by the way this video you're watching right now is um to get more than 1400 yrs I don't consider myself successful hmm but think about how shallow and really meaningless the form of engagement with politics is for somebody at a protest chanting a slogan or for somebody standing in the audience participating in that very limited way that the members of the audience will participate at Turning Point USA so said there's many times on this channel but if you think about the decade in the 1960s famous for political radicalism and political activism it's how it's how it's remembered rightly or wrongly how did my own parents get drawn into extremism it was through incredibly shallow interactions with political organizations interactions that could be as simple as someone handing you a pamphlet and before the Internet you had no ability to Google the people in that pamphlet you no ability to find out more about their background or what they represented politically you could go to a library we could if there were books cited or reference in the pathway you can find a little bit more but to a ridiculous extent in the decade of the 1960's people put their faith in individual leaders on the basis of a very shallow interaction at a protest in person at a demonstration or hearing a speech they delivered to a crowd on the basis of a pamphlet a short essay writing of this kind there was no moving beyond that that shallow facade politically so both of my parents they were not moderate communists they became absolute crazy extremists and it destroyed their lives and it destroyed other people's lives and keeping it all the way real for probably the first 15 years of my life it destroyed my life also it had a lot of really negative impacts on me and of course as I was growing up and questioning my parents beliefs even just their assumptions about the world put it that way it was often amazing to me how facile that were even compared to kind of the level of fact-checking that I was going through as a teenager and figuring out how the world worked how economics worked how you know claims about what was going on in the world - and left and right were different and they did you guys end up Oh what was the what was the path of what was the downward spiral that led them to their you know political extremism well in a lot of ways the portrait that paints is much darker and more dangerous than the portrait that Caleb paints that Faraday speaks paints that the guy covered in this New York Times article there's actually a lot more hope for the future in the fact that now you have thousands and tens of thousands of people engaging with content and engaging with one another in a meaningful way over hours and hours and hours and where they're rapidly able to find it oh well you know that this person on YouTube this is their view on this issue then I can google and find out what's their view by contrast on this other issue we can interrogate the sources even if it's just as a viewer but obviously Caleb's experience or Faraday's experience um his experience isn't limited purely to being a passive viewer it also involves you know text-based interaction and discussion through live chat and forums like discord or what have you know one of the unfortunate things about this New York Times article is that the journalists analysis of the problem is much less interesting at much less intelligence than Caleb's analysis which you can find on his own YouTube channel katelyn points are quite a number of interesting things including his proposal that one of the one of the crucial variables here is the extent to which people like himself were listening to this content while playing video games that they were engaging in so-called online debates while playing video games that it's for him it was a very strange mix of the passive and the active he talks about the dopamine receptors the sense of enjoyment the sense of entertainment - this brings I think he has some really interesting insights and analysis there that you will not find in this New York Times article at all and again that's very different from the crowd attending that the conference hosted by turning-points USA or the small number of demonstrators participating in a vegan you know vegan riot but it's helping chuffing up and you know protesting at a slaughterhouse or something the fact that this is a political speech political posturing and the formation of moral opinions the you know expressing one's own sense of ethical identity and ethical superiority over other that this becomes for people a kind of entertainment supplemental to video games that it's thin these are things they listen to while at least half distracted or half preoccupied with this very self-indulgence very very highly stimulative you know visually very stimulating form of entertainment and they're not even side by side one is sort one form of entertainment is kind of embedded in the other and I noticed that you know a part of the fact that the listeners in the audience may be playing video games while they're doing this there were many political commentary channels now where what they're showing on screen is the commentator playing video games while talking about this this is a very strange and interesting aspect that certainly didn't exist in any other period of political science and again I like what Faraday says about it I don't like the fact that New York Times gives this you know if you were to ask what does this political leader mean to you almost nobody is gonna say oh he's meaningful and important to me because he entertains me while I'm playing video games but that is very literally the relationship of leader to follower that people in this audience you know get get drawn into and that's whether it's left wing right wing or in the middle so is there some comparison to the role of American radio talk-show hosts in the Golden Age of people driving to work while listening to radio I mean I often wondered with something like Rush Limbaugh Rush Limbaugh was a right-wing radio personality would anyone have really listened to this or taking it seriously or respected this guy's opinions if they were really paying attention to what this radio talk-show said but people would listen to this type of political speech on radio because it was it was really all political posturing and so they would listen to it while driving their cars had already put the audience in a somewhat different relationship to the authority of the of the person speaking in some ways more passive and in some ways more active perhaps the category of political commentary on youtube that caleb is responding to in this new york times article it's striking to me that almost none of these people are actually engaged in charity work or actually engaged in humanitarian work are actually involved in efforts to make the world a better place and they're definitely not involved in activism in that sense of the word there are engaged in activism in a different sense because no doubt engaging in conversations here on YouTube it is activism in one sense of the word somebody like Lauren southern is a surreal and instructive example Lauren southern her first issue made her a little bit famous was her defiance against feminist street protests but you can ask the question and I think nobody does ask this question what what is Lauren southern trying to accomplish does Lauren southern actually want to help women does Lauren Southern actually want to help feminists like is Lauren southern actually trying to help for example women in Saudi Arabia a society that really is oppressive impressive woman or she actually interested in accomplishing something positive for feminists in the western court you know whatever that would be is hard to imagine Laurens haven't moved on to her final work as a as a YouTube filmmaker before she decided to go back to university and try something else with their career was this really bizarre film series about white farm owners in South Africa I think you know there's no way you can look at this corpus of work she created and think that she was sincerely involved in an attempt to help farmers these are farm owners these are not the poor and landless farm workers but it's not conceivable that what she's doing is actually part of a humanitarian effort or charitable effort to help farmers in South Africa no I say this as someone who has experience with trying to help farmers in a poverty-stricken country in Southeast Asia in Laos I am NOT saying my efforts had any positive outcomes in fact I could talk about my experience of charity work entirely in terms of the negative outcomes that but nevertheless there's something very meaningful and educational and instructive instructional for me there's instructional value for me in my going out and living with rice farmers in a poverty-stricken part of the world and my doing the research and my learning their language and learning about wealth and poverty and you know the role of government regulation and who gets to own the land and you know who's cutting down the forests and why and deforestation and ecological problems and farming and you know there's a whole fascinating little demi-monde about agricultural poverty and the emergence of people out of poverty through agriculture people get rich through agriculture and deforestation all that stuff too you know my engagement with that was necessarily okay put it this way what Lauren southern does is a lot more like being a movie star and is a lot less like humanitarian work or even humanitarian research what she's done is created a kind of semi-fictional semi documentary movie in which she gets to play the starring role rather than being sincerely engaged in actually helping people on humanitarian basis or tried to learn things that teach this to audience on a research basis that is very very different from my experience again I was gonna use the word humbling I went into that it was already humble to begin with before I got out in those rice farms you know it's but certainly for someone like Lauren southern it would be very humbling for her to go out and and have those experiences and yeah it's a topic for another video but obviously there's a contrast here to my experience with veganism as a social political movement to how humbling that is or how pathetic that is I could I could say something in parallel here so the New York Times coverage of Faraday speaks of Caleb's story it is an interesting milestone in terms of the world outside YouTube recognizing the extent to which YouTube politics are real politics they really matter they have really deep impact on people's lives and it's a large number of people especially compared to the number of people who participate in protests street protests or rallies like you know turning-point USA rally where people are attending at a conference center or even at a stadium it's a large number people and it's tremendous depth and durability of engagement many many hours of listening and speaking in a way that those other types of political forums you know they can't possibly compete with YouTube in that sense and one reaction to that depth and magnitude of importance of what YouTube is and when it can be politically I think what it neva tably will be politically whether it's YouTube or another website that competes with YouTube there's nothing special about YouTube some other video video sharing website could start to take on the role on future at the very end of this article the journalist suggests that caleb was doing something wrong in jumping out of a right-wing YouTube rabbit hole quote only to jump into a left-wing YouTube rabbit hole close quote the journalist asked if Farraday would consider cutting back on his video intake altogether and rebuilding some of his offline relationships quote he hesitated and looked slightly confused for all of its problems he said YouTube is still where political battles are fought and won leaving the platform would essentially mean abandoning the debate close quote so what the journalist is trying to do here is present you with an entirely false argument that the grass is greener on the other side of the hill and it's not people do this to me all the time when I talk about vegan politics within YouTube and I'm taking it really seriously it's saying look guys what happened here on YouTube in the last five years the veganism really matters and some people want to react to that by just saying no no no what happened on V you what happened on YouTube that doesn't matter at all because the real politics the other side of the hill the grass is greener on the other side of the hill there's some other political world whether they imagine that being in university classrooms or just people standing on street corners holding up a sign and handing out pamphlets doing these kinds of protests that that's the real political sphere which is supposedly so much more meaningful and involves so many more people than YouTube and that is 180 degrees wrong people standing on street corners it's a small number of people it's a very shallow form of engagement it's relatively meaningless and what we have going on here on YouTube is deep and meaningful and durable and real and it involves people getting to know one another building up relationships of trust and in some cases relationships of doubt and distrust learning new things sharing what they've learned yes leading one another astray but also ultimately becoming better people and that is much more meaningful and much more important than any experience you can have at a street protest or attending an organized political convention or rally YouTube politics are real politics and this is part of the slow and inexorable waking up of the mainstream media to that fact